According to that Report, a boy, only nine years old, living at Wadsley, four or five miles from Sheffield, was obliged by his father to work as cellar-boy in one of the furnaces, on most days of the week from six in the morning to six or seven in the evening, and on Saturdays from three in the morning till three in the afternoon. This enforced labour at a high temperature would, if only occasional, appear to be equivalent to a somewhat long compulsory innings in the Turkish bath. Imposed nearly every day, it may be considered by some who do not consider too deeply, to constitute a combination of the Turkish bath with Turkish tyranny, and tyranny about as barbarous as ever was practised in Turkey. [Illustration: A DISTINCTION THE "GOOD PARSON" (to applicant for instruction in the Night School): "Have you been confirmed, my boy?" BOY (hesitating): "Please, sir--I--don't know." PARSON: "You understand me; has the Bishop laid his hands on you?" BOY: "Oh, no, sir, but his Keeper have, sir--very often, sir!"] Naturally, such outspoken comments gave offence, and in 1866 and again in 1868 _Punch_ was very much in the black books of the Black Country for what he said on the state of morals, manners and education among the workers of that region of coal and iron. The controversy began with some lines, "The Queen in the Black Country," which were inspired by the inauguration of Prince Albert's statue at Wolverhampton. These gave pain to certain susceptible inhabitants of that town. _Punch's_ reply was to quote from the report of the Children's Employment Commission of 1864 on the trades in the Wolverhampton district, showing that all the large employers lived far away from the workpeople they employed; that a few ministers of religion were almost the only representatives of the upper class resident in the "Black Country"; that large numbers of children, youths, young persons and women worked the same long hours as the men, from 6 or 7 A.M. to 9, 10 and 11 P.M.; that among them little girls were often kept bellows-blowing fourteen hours a day. * * * * * [Sidenote: _Laws to Protect Children_] In January, 1868, _Punch_ was accused of being a Rip Van Winkle, who had been asleep for half a century, because when Bishop Selwyn was translated from New Zealand to Lichfield he had published some verses ending up with the question, "What's the savage o'er sea to the savage at home?" His answer was to say that he wished he _could_, like Rip Van Winkle, fall asleep not over the Black Country only, but over every manufacturing district of England, to wake in fifty years and find education for ignorance, thrift and comfort for improvidence and squalor, gentleness and refinement for coarseness and brutality among men and women; health and happiness for sickliness and suffering, premature decrepitude and deadening of mind among children. But the facts were too strong for him:--